Memoirs of a 'decent' man

Sir Kier Starmer resigned the way he assumed power in the first place. By revealing a relationship with truth so estranged it would make Josef Stalin blush.

“Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt,” Starmer told the country outside Downing Street.

It is necessary to deal with each of these claims in turn by virtue of the fact that unless challenged, recent history becomes ossified into a straitjacket of received wisdom that fatally conditions what can be thought possible in the future.

Politically Bankrupt

In 2019, Labour under Corbyn, as Starmer and his acolytes never tired of saying, achieved the party’s worst showing since 1935, winning just 202 seats. Boris Johnson’s Conservatives  won 365 seats, their best performance since Thatcher’s victory coronation of 1987.

Apart from memory-holing the election just two years before in which Labour had somehow secured the largest increase in its vote since 1945, this warped interpretation conveniently ignores how 2019 was uniquely about one issue, Brexit. And Corbyn’s Labour, faced with a core support overwhelming backing Remain and 2/3rds of the actual constituencies it was defending having voted Leave, was trying to pull off the most delicate of balancing acts.

Its 2017 result partly stemmed from a promise to respect the result of the referendum. But this stance was made all but impossible by then shadow Brexit spokesman – Sir Kier Starmer himself – deliberately violating the agreed party policy and telling the 2018 Labour conference that he wanted a second referendum “and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option”. This led to the perception that Labour was a part of a ‘Remain alliance’ and doomed it in the eyes of many voters in ‘Red Wall’ constituencies, and elsewhere.

Starmer also torpedoed cross-party negotiations with the May government in 2018 over getting a Brexit deal through the Commons, even ruling out his own party policy on a customs union. Thus, he ensured that the hardest of all Brexit deals would be the one to succeed.

But as soon as he became Labour leader in 2020, the ‘King of Remainia’ went through a strange metamorphosis and declared that “Britain’s future is outside the EU” and all arguments about the issue belonged to the past. Clearly his previous stance was very principled, though, and not all an amoral strategy to displace Corbyn at all costs.

Notwithstanding Starmer’s antics, the 2019 election would still have been closer had not Nigel Farage’s ‘Brexit Party’ (actually a company, not a political party) chosen not to stand in 317 Conservative-held seats. This had the result of artificially inflating the Conservative vote share and probably their number of seats.

Curiously, the Conservatives, who must have received – according to Starmer’s interpretation – such a resounding mandate in 2019 (in contrast to Corbyn’s Labour), have since shrunk to a rump of 121 seats. Why they have plunged into such an ‘existential crisis’ in such a short space of time is something of a mystery, unless of course the issue of Brexit artificially hid their real popularity just as it artificially magnified Labour’s divisions.

Financially bankrupt

This is especially ridiculous. Labour in 2019 were flush with cash, on the back of surging membership numbers which peaked at 600,000. Starmer’s unique talent was to reverse this process by telling hundreds of thousands of people to leave (“the door is open”), or simply expelling them.

He then partially plugged this gap by suddenly becoming immensely appealing to very rich people (many of whom formerly donated to the Tories) and corporations. For example, Labour’s 2024 election campaign was bankrolled by a huge £4 million donation from hedge fund Quadrature Capital, the largest single donation the party had ever received. But because of when it was received – in the week after Sunak called the election but before the “pre-poll reporting period” – Labour didn’t have to publicly declare it during the campaign. And our fearless media didn’t bother to enlighten anyone.

Morally Bankrupt

Now we come to the crux of Sir Kier’s appeal to posterity. He was a ‘decent’ man, fighting against the odds to rescue the party he loved from the cesspit of antisemitism into which it had fallen under Jeremy Corbyn.

The truth is rather different. Starmer, as the public face of the right-wing ‘Labour Together’ faction, cynically used antisemitism allegations to purge thousands of left-wingers from the party whose only crime was to criticise Israel, a country which would go on to refute these criticisms by committing a genocide in Gaza.

Of course, Sir Kier was on hand to support what was happening, lay on surveillance flights over Gaza, and increase arms sales at the height of the killing.

The Starmer purge extended to Corbyn, forced out of the party for observing, correctly – even mildly – that the extent of antisemitism in the party had been “dramatically overstated” by political opponents and the media.

Under Starmer the totalitarian mentality so gathered pace that even suggesting that Labour wasn’t riddled to the core with antisemites was an offence punishable with expulsion. Victims of this witch hunt included a Jewish professor, hauled up charges of simply repeating a pun by another Jewish member of the Labour party (Jo Bird’s ‘Jew process’) and an elderly Jewish woman accused of, among other things, “demonising Israel by inaccurately [sic] describing it as an apartheid state”.

There is a definite ‘pattern of behaviour’ here. In fact, as leader, Starmer expelled more Jews from the Labour party than all previous Labour leaders combined. As Andrew Feinstein (Starmer’s opponent in Holborn & St Pancras in 2024) pointed out, that is like expelling people of colour to combat racism.

In truth, the one decent thing that Sir Kier Starmer did was resign. Everything else was appalling.

Starmer’s handmaidens

But it would be wrong to see Starmer’s momentary ascendancy as being solely down to the man himself, once generously described as “a piece of hotel art made man”. Nor was his brief reign merely the responsibility of his sponsors in the shadowy Labour Together group, likened in their amorality to the denizens of Richard Nixon’s White House.

There had to be other powerful forces behind the strange phenomenon of Sir Kier Starmer and there were – the British media and important parts of the British state.

At every stage of his political career, the media had Starmer’s back, because, in essence, he had a job to – to destroy Corbynism at its roots. For example, every national media organisation (barring the Morning Star) enthusiastically backed Starmer’s decision to suspend Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour party for his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission report.

The EHRC report was itself a sham, though. It deliberately refused to hear evidence contradicting its interpretation, erroneously described those guilty of ‘antisemitism’ as being ‘agents’ of the party, and accused the Corbyn leadership of acting unlawfully by riding roughshod over ‘established procedures’ to intervene in individual cases, when the party’s rule book explicitly allowed it to.

When the circumstances cried out for investigative journalism, all you got was consecration. And a herd of braying donkeys.

Conversely, when Starmer did subsequently furiously intervene in antisemitism cases to expel the (left-wing) perpetrators forthwith – something the EHRC (wrongly) said the Labour leadership was not allowed to do – there was complete media silence.

And when Starmer jerked Labour massively to the Right, after being elected as Labour leader by promising to continue with Corbyn’s policies, the media response was largely to commend him for practising clever politics.

Sometimes the cognitive dissonance was breathtaking. One of Starmer’s pledges  to members when he was campaigning to be elected Labour leader was to “end the Tories’ cruel sanctions regime”. In reality when he got into government, not only did he fail to do this, he actually made it worse, increasing sanctions to their highest ever level in January 2026. According to an Amnesty spokesperson, “I’ve worked to highlight human rights violations for more than two decades and witnessed many awful situations. But never have I encountered such raw and widespread distress from people sharing their experiences in the UK.”

But, to the British media, this world, which affects millions of people, simply doesn’t exist.

And the media omertà about Starmer spread its tattered net far wider. The successful campaign by Starmer backers Labour Together to hamstring left-wing media organisations like The Canary after 2017 by getting advertisers to withdraw on the laughable basis of not supporting ‘fake news’ happened, at the time, completely in the shadows. Anti-Corbyn Labour bureaucrats’ scheme to funnel money to right-wing MPs in 2017 at the expense of the official campaign barely registered. And Starmer’s predilection for money and freebies from high-net-worth individuals and corporations to fill the financial void left by members deserting in droves was, almost without exception, left to the alternative media, who had a far smaller reach, to expose.

The 40-watt searchlights of the mainstream media continued their feeble glare after 2024. Starmer Labour’s 2025 deal with pharmaceutical corporations, which will double the amount the NHS pays for drugs, trampled all over the independence of NICE, the body that decides whether drugs are cost-effective and should be paid for by the NHS. But the deal was presented in entirely vanilla terms by the media, thus concealing what it was really about.

Our strange form of democracy – really oligarchy accompanied by ratification by universal suffrage – has left us in a paradoxical situation. Powerful and wealthy vested interests decide who can, and cannot, have political power (not Corbyn for example) but voters then cast their judgement on them. The result has been seven Prime Ministers in the last decade.

The fact that no-one of influence can see the problem is why they inflicted Sir Kier on us and expected it to work.

When Clement Met Margaret – the unholy alliance of the 1950s and the 1980s

It’s the worst of both worlds. A glance at 20^th century economic history indicates that the noxious right-wing consensus currently ruling the roost in this country is intent on the nightmarish combination of post-WW2 military Keynesianism (state spending on arms manufacturers) with 1920s/1980s austerity which shuffles the tax burden onto ordinary people and lets the rich get away with murder.

In order to appease Trump, Sir Kier Starmer has promised to spend an extra £32 billion a year on defence (taking spending on weapons to at least 3.5% of GDP) ostensibly on the absurd notion of protecting the country from Vladimir Putin menacing British streets. And absent any willingness to tax the billionaires, this can only come from renewed austerity and increased taxation on most people.

The image of post-war decades in this country (and Europe) is bathed in the sepia-tinted light of the birth of welfare states and health services. Out of the rubble of World War Two, Britain created the National Health Service and instituted a mass council house building programme, two things that clearly cost a lot of money. This can be designated social Keynesianism (state spending that benefits people).

However, this memory is selective. At the same time, after falling immediately after the Second World War, military spending hit 11.2% of GDP around the time of the Korean War in the early ’50s. It subsequently dropped but still remained comparatively high, holding steady at over 5% of the GDP in the 1970s.  This can be designated military Keynesianism (state spending on weapons). Hitler and later Ronald Reagan were quite taken with the concept.

Bear in mind that 5% of GDP is what Trump and Nato want military spending to be.

In truth, the post-war years saw the creation of both a welfare and a warfare state. “After the Second World War, Britons built not only a new Jerusalem but a new Sparta,” writes historian David Edgerton in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation. “Though no longer one of the greatest powers, in the 1950s the United Kingdom was militarized to an unprecedented peacetime degree.”

Into the 1960s and ’70s, he notes, the “warfare state” consumed more than the health or education budget.

Now we are told, in the midst of what is undeniably a much richer country, that we must choose warfare over welfare. Not we have a genuine welfare state nowadays anyway. After years of ever greater conditionality rules being attached to it, it is more properly classed a punishment state.

But what is interesting about the post-war years is not only that a balancing act between welfare and warfare was achieved but that it was done without imposing unbearable levels of taxation on ordinary people. The lower middle class enjoyed an effective tax rate far lower than today (before the increase in military spending hits), whilst large and essential ‘consumer’ items, such as houses, were much more affordable.

How was this possible, let alone actualised? The answer lies in three decades of robust economic growth (the best in the history of capitalism) which permitted rising public spending – part of which was diverted to military purposes – and the paying off of war debts. But this package, benign in certain respects, was enabled by much heavier taxation of the wealthy, encapsulated in the Beatles’ song ‘Taxman’, an embittered two and half minute whinge about paying 92.6% supertax. In fairness to its author, George Harrison objected to paying tax so governments could find new ways to bomb people and in that he was, at least partially, justified.

Socially speaking, however, the post-war years were a conscious repudiation of the policies of the 1920s and ’30s. As shown by Clara Mattei in The Capital Order in many countries, Britain and Italy for example, this involved swingeing cuts to public spending (that had risen in the aftermath of World War One), coupled with reducing direct taxation on the rich and increasing indirect taxation of consumption, especially duties on working class pleasures such as tobacco, beer and spirits. In Britain corporation tax, only created in 1920, was abolished four years later and would only return after 1945.

By then this economic cocktail was thoroughly discredited. It had contributed to and exacerbated the economic depression of the 1930s, laying the foundations for the worst conflict in human history, the Second World War.

But the dawn of the 1980s was long enough for amnesia to have set in. Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in America set about rehabilitating the economic prescriptions of the 1920s. Public spending was held down, mass privatisation inaugurated, and taxation precepts turned upside down. Direct, progressive, taxes on the rich were slashed while consumption taxes – regressive because everyone pays the same – were hiked. For example, corporation tax was 51% in 1981 and it is now at less than half that level (and recently has been even lower). VAT has gone in the opposite direction. It stood at 8% in 1979 and has since nearly trebled.

There is admittedly one significant difference. Whereas the austerity mongers of the 1920s were unconcerned about the effects of their policies on mass consumption, since the 1980s our political overlords have been far less complacent. A four-decades long house price boom, the huge expansion of personal debt, frequently low interest rates, and the introduction of tax credits have attempted to compensate for the fact that wages have not risen as they did in the post-war decades and in recent years have flatlined.

Some have called this privatised Keynesianism – a third kind of economic policy named after someone who died in 1946.

But the point is that, in conspicuous contrast to their predecessors of the 1920s, Thatcherism and Reaganism had the necessary stickiness. They stayed around. So much so that the current ‘Labour’ government in Britain is, in essential respects, Thatcherite. It is committed to deregulation, not increasing tax on the wealthy and keeping utilities like water and electricity in private hands. Any similarity to the Clement Attlee government of 1945-51 is purely rhetorical.

Except, though, in one respect. It is intent on repeating the trick of post-war military Keynesianism which, in addition to the creation of the NHS and nationalisation, the Attlee government eventually succumbed to, especially with Britain’s involvement in the Korean war in 1950. In response to this, defence spending doubled.

The post-war decision to increase weapons spending was not painless. It involved introducing charges for some NHS services which sparked a bitter controversy and much soul-searching about the meaning of democratic socialism.  But the conversion happened without sacrificing the core of the post-war settlement. The Conservatives – in power from 1951 – continued the huge council house building programme and the welfare state was expanded in the 1960s and ’70s.  Government policies tended towards increasing equality.

However, that was then. Thanks to the incredible shelf-life of Thatcherism, we don’t live in the same country anymore. As a result, something has to give – if you want to spend an extra £32 billion on the military, the money will have to be re-allocated from elsewhere and augmented from increasing taxation even more on moderate earners.

This process is already in the works.  In addition to slashing support for new claimants for disability benefit, the government is merging the Work Capability Assessment (for Universal Credit) into the assessment for Personal Independence Payments.  It is estimated that over 600,000 chronically ill and disabled people will lose their means of support as a result.

Plans to raise the state pension age to 70 are cut from the same cloth.

As socialist economist Michael Burke has said, “the funding for the war drive can only be generated by much harsher austerity, harsher even than in 2010.”

More and more, the decades following World War Two appear a unique aberration in the history of capitalism, precipitated by a uniquely destructive conflagration that was the deadliest in history.

Rather the norm is austerity, low taxation of the rich and corporations, unending hostility towards trade unions, and military aggressiveness.

Politically we are reverting to type too. The Second World War alliance against Nazism of a ‘communist’ country and western capitalist states only came about as a last resort after the latter had exhausted all other possibilities. Previously, and for years, British and French elites had wanted to enlist the Nazis as a “bulwark against Communism”, giving them a “free hand” to attack the Soviet Union. Even after the outbreak of the Second World War (during the seven-month “phoney war”), Britain and France still plotted an attack on the Soviets.

The preference for the far right has clear echoes today. Despite growing public disquiet at the genocide, the British government is still supporting the Fascist Israeli government and the West finds de facto support to Fascist thugs in Ukraine aligns with its geopolitical ambitions.

Is there an alternative to this witches’ brew? I want to explore those possibilities in a later post.

Rightification: A Theory

 

In May, in the midst of the concerted effort to deny disabled people who can’t dress themselves any means of support, work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall gave a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of Thatcherite Labour.

The cuts, were “crucial”, Kendall averred, “to fighting the rise in populist politics”

They really believe that by forcing through right-wing, necrophile Thatcherite policies they are holding the fort against Trump-esque barbarians when, in fact, they are causing not so much a drift to the Right as a raging stampede.

The disability cuts Labour wanted to implement are a perfect example. The ‘victory’ of PIP cuts being postponed (not shelved, they still might come back in a different form) hides the fact that the other major aspect of the cuts – reducing the weekly benefit of new claimants in the most severe Limited Capacity for Work-Related Activity group by nearly £50 a week from next year – was passed into law.

The cut is greater than the £30 a week one introduced by the Tories in 2016. It’s an interesting theory that you defeat the right by becoming more right-wing that it is.

Or rather was. Because caving in to the slavering dogs just whets their appetite. The proudly Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies says Labour “must go further”, while Tory leader Kemi Badenoch warns that the “benefits bill” is a “ticking time bomb” which could “collapse the economy”.

Reform UK, meanwhile, wants to force 1 million plus people back into work, declaring that it is the party of “workers and strivers, not shirkers and skivers” (yes it actually rhymes, it sounds like some nightmarish poem written by a 70-year-old bloke with too much time on his hands).

But the truly scary thing that, to Labour’s Machiavellian strategists like Morgan McSweeney, this is a sign that everything is working perfectly. At the next election, Labour will claim it alone is sensible and moderate, while the alternatives send a shudder down the spine. I’m sure some will be seduced by this ploy (but not enough as Labour has alienated so many people that it is clearly toast).

By its action and inactions, and bovine right-wing impulses, Labour is causing this right-wing flood to happen.

Surely there is no-one more slavishly pro-Israel than this Labour government? Labour has increased weapons sales to Israel before exempting the F35 bomber from its cosmetic restrictions. It refuses to call the worst genocide of the century a genocide. It still undertakes (now privatised) daily spy flights over Gaza from an RAF base in Cyprus and places pensioners who oppose the mass killing under house arrest.

But meet Kemi Badenoch, who won’t utter a word of criticism of Israel, thinks the country is fighting “a proxy war on behalf of the UK” and has appointed as shadow foreign secretary a woman who believes UK aid should go to the Israeli Defence [sic] Force.

Or say hello to Nigel Farage who finds the Netanyahu/Trump Gaza Riveira plan for ethnic cleansing “appealing”, and frets that the UK is  not an ally of Israel anymore.

Rachel Reeves, absurdly, wants to deregulate finance again, allowing people to borrow for mortgages at more than four and a half times their income. This is despite the fact that the 2008 financial crisis was precipitated by exactly this kind of permissive environment (it’s easy to forget that we had our own home-grown banking crisis in 2007 caused by Gordon Brown’s light touch regulation before the American one spread across the globe the following year).

But who is going to oppose this desperation? Probably not Kemi Badenoch who regards Argentina’s chainsaw wielding ‘anarcho-capitalist’ President Javier Milei as the template for her imaginary government.

Nor Nigel Farage, the former stockbroker who wants to “keep the flame of Thatcherism alive” by reducing corporation tax to 15%.

Starmer is fruitlessly aping Reform UK’s rhetoric, justifying and amplifying its pseudo-fascist ‘solutions’ while still being markedly less popular with its supporters than his unmentionable socialist predecessor.

But when not emboldening Farage, Sir Kier is channelling the blessed Margaret by promoting the nightmare possibility of a “limited” nuclear war in Europe and appeasing Trump by promising to spend an extra £32 billion (!) every year on weapons, thus ensuring even harsher austerity than that of Cameron/Osborne.

The reaction from the opposition is not to advise caution but to chide that he is not “going far enough”, a phrase I predict we will hear with tiresome regularity in the run up to the next general election.

Reform UK, meanwhile, dreams of an  Musk-style DOGE in every council despite local government, post 2010, bearing the brunt of “the biggest and most sustained cuts in public spending since World War II”.

In their all-encompassing obsession with defeating the Left, the Labour party are fomenting, literally and figuratively, a right-wing arms race that will lead to disaster.

The irony is that I believe they believe that they will ultimately emerge victorious from this horror. The even greater irony is that the person they hate for nearly destroying ‘their’ party, succeeded by his mere presence is shifting the country slightly to the Left, while they – in government and on the back of a huge Parliamentary majority – are dragging it to the extreme Right even though most of its inhabitants don’t want to go there.

The new Left party cannot come soon enough.